I’ve been hoarding lots of search engine related postings waiting to put them up but my list of un-posted and rapidly ageing postings is getting out of hand. Here then without (much) comment are some links:

*Google gives free ads to non-profits* – See “Google Grants”:http://www.google.com/grants/. Charities must be based in the United States (at the moment). Thanks to Aaron Swartz’s Google Blog for the link

*A search engine for discussion forums* – Pandia alerted me to this new “Lycos search feature”:http://discussion.lycos.com/default.asp. It’s good to see some search innovation coming from outside the ‘big two’. Seems to me that other search engine companies may be able to carve out a role delivering specialised searches that the big boys don’t do (or don’t do as well).

*A new search engine specialising in business information* – “find.com”:http://find.com/matchpoint.aspx
Thanks to Tales from the Terminal Room

Directory of Open Access Journals (free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals) now has a search facility for 319 of the 1219 supported journals. Thanks for the heads-up Pandia

*Interesting source of Google-related info* – Google Metrics Watch – it ‘daily queries Google for a set of terms. The number of pages returned is stored in a database. The idea behind this is that an increase or decrease in the number of web pages refering to a subject COULD INDICATE (or will probably be associated to) the popularity of this subject.’

*How to find pages linking to your own site* – Link search with Yahoo! and Google

*Google Groups (finally) supports mailing list creation* – Check out the new “Google Groups”:http://groups-beta.google.com/ Thanks to Google Weblog for the link

*Yahoo search to access “deep web”* (for a price – selected partners only) – Yahoo crawls deep into the Web – News – ZDNet

JD Lasica “suggests”:http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1092267863.php that because blogs like “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ and “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.com/ are linked to more often than many websites of many ‘old media’ organizations, this means bloggers are starting to trust other bloggers more than the mainstream media.

While “Technorati’s chart of in-links”:http://ojr.org/ojr/uploads/1092273094.jpg (and “pubsub’s”:http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php) comparing ‘old media’ properties and blogs are interesting to see, they under-state the importance of the mainstream media to set the agenda because a very substantial proportion of the posts to blogs that are linked to are in turn derived directly from those same old media sites. A better (but more difficult to do) analysis would be to try to measure how many of the posts most linked to add significant facts or thought out opinions (more than just ‘I agree’) to existing debates in the press.

Moreover, it is absurd to extrapolate from the readership habits of bloggers to the readership habits of the wider public. Bloggers are in no way representative – we are much more likely to read other people’s weblogs than the broader Internet population (see “the analysis I did earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/001206.html) and of course most of us are geekier (Slashdot is the most popular weblog cited – QED).

If you want to see what influential US Internet pundit/policy wonks think about the potential of the Internet to change politics you should keep an eye on the Extreme Democracy weblog and download the chapters of the book in progress there.

“Emergent Democracy”:http://www.extremedemocracy.com/archives/2004/08/chapter_1_emerg.html which I “commented on earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/000687.html is there for example. It has been edited since my comments but it still appears to overlook the very real problem of the continuing digital divide both in the US and across the world and both in Internet access and, more importantly, in the forms of Internet use. I suspect most of the chapters of this book shares this problem though I have yet to read more of them.

All the evidence I have been able to derive (based on the raw data of a Pew survey in Mar/April 2003 which was made into a “report”:http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/report_display.asp) suggests weblogs – particularly political ones – are read by a very small audience. To quote some earlier research I did based on the Pew data:
(more…)

Giving away most of his $45m fortune was not enough for Zell Kravinsky – he gave away one of his kidneys too, to a black woman who was a stranger to him and who would probably otherwise have died. His was one of only ‘several dozen’ nondirected kidney donations made each year in the US. The more I read this New Yorker article about Kravinsky the more admiration I feel for him and the more it saddens me that he seems to be painted largely as a crank. He seems to have been inspired by Peter Singer whose influential essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality pointed out (to my mind convincingly) that there is no moral difference between failing to save a child who is drowning in a shallow pond right in front of you and failing to give money to charity that would help to save a child’s life in Bangladesh. Moreover it is hard to establish a moral difference between one’s responsibility to one’s family and friends and the same responsibility to any other person in need. (I am not at all persuaded incidentally by Singer’s next step which is to suggest that All Animals are Equal and therefore, ‘ that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species’).

I do believe (uncomfortably) that I should really be living at a minimum comfort level and the rest of my money should be going to those who need it in the third world. Like most people however I would have great difficulty living according to that principle and accordingly I put it to the back of my mind and try to do what I can within the limits of ‘normal’ behaviour. That makes me all the more filled with admiration for one of the few people who seems to be making a serious, conscientious attempt to live according to those principles (albeit imperfectly – he and his family are not living a millionaire lifestyle but neither are they ‘living poor’).

More coverage of his story from The Daily Telegraph.

“Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/’ decision to produce a page of links to Graduate Student Advice has inspired me to do the same. “Seb Paquet”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/ alerted Alex and me to “his collection of advice”:http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Advice_For_Young_Scholars and to those two I would like to add PhinisheD FAQs from the very useful virtual self-help community “PhinisheD”:http://www.phinished.org/ (which I have to say I have yet to actually introduce myself to).

Last but not least you may also wish to download consult one or more of the presentations and documents provided as part of the LSE’s “Study Skills Workshop”:http://learning.lse.ac.uk/detail.asp?EventID=20. The material is notionally aimed at LSE students but the general guidance is applicable to anyone. “Study-Skills.net”:http://www.study-skills.net/ may also be worth a look.

“Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/ has tried to produce a ranking of

I just discovered that Amazon US is selling my book Dealing with E-Mail for 60% off – it’s $2.80! At that price you’d be crazy not to buy a copy. Here’s an overview of the book:

This book was designed to be a simple non-technical guide, inexpensive enough to give to everyone in an organization, that would nonetheless introduce workers at all levels to many of the key techniques they can use to manage email more effectively and the key security and legal issues they may face. These include:

• Filing your email automatically
• Managing email address books
• Making sure your address does not get picked up by spammers and…
• Removing spam automatically when it arrives.
• Dealing with email-borne viruses
• Writing clear and culturally-sensitive email
• Preventing confidential email from being intercepted and read and
• Being aware of legal issues that may arise including sexual harassment, commercial confidentiality and breach of contract.

The book has been written to be broadly applicable to users of any e-mail system and from any country.

As organizations increasingly use email as a business-critical tool they will become vulnerable to email-borne viruses, spam, legal problems and un-manageable volumes of unnecessary messages unless they ensure that everyone – not just the IT staff and HR managers – learns some of the basic techniques outlined in this book.

There is also a “companion site”:http://www.well.com/user/derb/dealingwithemail/ for the book containing more detailed information and up to date tips.

“Ethan Zuckerman”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/02/27#a138 has produced an interesting paper on blogging as a political force in the Third World – commenting on the enthusiasm for Internet-mediated political debate expressed by Jim Moore in an essay “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html and by Joi Ito in “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html. I blogged about the latter essay “some months ago”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html#000687.

He warns astutely:

“If that group [enthusiasts for ‘weblog democracy’] forgets that they’re outliers in terms of larger society and fails to include others in the shaping of these technologies, it’s unlikely that these tools will be useful to the wider world”.

He also suggests that bloggers can’t provide a critical alternative to the mainstream media when a region is not adequately covered:

“When journalists don’t cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar – they have no signal to reinforce. There aren’t enough bloggers in eastern Congo to give us a sense for what’s really going on.”

He suggests that Third World expats writing about their own nations from abroad and (though he doesn’t explicitly say this) First World expats writing about the countries they are visiting or trying to help could help fill the gap in coverage of third world issues and give the rest of the world a personal view.
He notes the weakness of this proposal:

these discussions are open only to people with the access to the Internet (which cuts out people in countries who censor, people in unsderserved rural areas, as well as people who don’t have money to spend time online); primarily open to people who speak and write English well; primarily open to people who can afford to spend time online engaging in these dialogues (cutting out many people whose jobs don’t afford them the luxury of working in front of a CRT).

He highlights some interesting solutions to the problem of language and cultural barriers to mutual comprehension – “Blogalization”:http://www.blogalization.info/reorganization/, for example, encourages bloggers who can speak foreign languages to translate interesting posts and news items into other relevant languages (chiefly English) – acting as a volunteer news agency. “Living on the Planet”:http://www.livingontheplanet.com/about.html is similar (but only translates to English.
In the end, he acknowledges:

Generally speaking, though, in most developing nations, the Net is not the obvious place to look for political change. So few citizens are online, and those who are generally are atypically wealthy and powerful that the Internet is a poor way to reach the grassroots. Instead, it’s useful to think about what media are analogous to the Internet in developing nations. One likely parallel is talk radio.

He seems to suggest in his conclusion that the “solution” to ensuring that the third world can part lies with the toolmakers – a technical fix.

But a real solution, I suggest, would have to involve a lot of grassroots capacity building work to ensure that a broad range of people in these countries (not just the elites):

1) have access to the technology
2) have the time and literacy to engage with them and
3) are listened to by those with power in their countries.

Big (some might say impossible) preconditions but without them a Third World Blogosphere would be an elite echo chamber. I fear that if tech boosters succeed in persuading developing country governments to foster a burgeoning blogosphere in their countries it would just serve to further benefit the articulate middle classes and elites in those countries who already have influence.

Whether the weblogging ‘community’ is ‘fair’ or not depends on whether you look at opportunity or outcome. Not everyone has the opportunity to blog (this takes time and an internet connection) but as “Danah Boyd”:http://www.danah.org/ points out in a pair of recent postings about blogging and fairness the weblogging community looks even more unfair when you look at outcome – who is actually doing it.

In her first post on the subject she suggests out that propensity to blog seems to be “concentrated among straight white men”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/001400.html#001400 – in the “second”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/001402.html#001402 she suggests that just because the world of blogging is in principle open to all (or at least all with time and money to spare) and therefore fair (according to “Clay Shirky”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/06/joi_are_blogs_just.php) it doesn’t mean that the situation is necessarily right.

Clay appears to agree but suggests, ‘I can’t imagine a system that would right the obvious but hard to quantify injustice of the weblog world that wouldn’t also destroy its dynamism.’

Both he and Joi Ito, whose “posting”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/01/06/are_blogs_just.html sparked the discussion in the first place seem to suggest that if a solution were to be found it would be through changes to the software itself. I think the definition of the problem and its solution needs to be broader – a ‘technical solution’ to the problem of inequality of participation and outcome in weblogging is not likely because that problem is largely a reflection of inequalities in society itself.

[Update: Oops – it seems I missed a later “post by Clay”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/06/boyd_ahtisaari_and_butterfield_v_me_dont_bet_on_me.php in which he actually partly makes my point below himself, saying there is ‘equality of technological opportunity, but one heavily dependent on other, external factors.’]

My own evolving PhD project at the “LSE”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm
will be looking at what kind of people do Internet self-publishing, why those people do it and what social effects this new capability is having (currently using Bourdieu’s work as a theoretical basis).

The main point that has been largely missing so far in the discussion I think is that the barriers to blogging or other self-publishing (in the developed world at least) are not solely (or even mainly) money and time but attitude. It takes a certain attitude to want to share your thoughts and experience in this way and many people who one might argue should contribute (poor and/or minority people for example) don’t because (among other things) it isn’t the kind of thing they would think of doing and nobody they know does it.

If one believes that it would be of benefit both to society and to the individual participants that the practice of weblogging were more widely distributed, making the tools cheaper and easier to use is a necessary but not sufficient step. The benefits of such activity would need to be demonstrated and promoted by and among people of those other communities.

P.S. Has anyone done a recent study of webloggers or personal home page creators that looks not just at age and sex but at education level, occupation, ethnicity or better still class?

P.P.S. There’s lots more on the question of whether we should worry mainly about inequality of opportunity or of outcome (when looking in this case at the economy) over at “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001040.html

Today I graduated from my “Masters”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mScInNewMediaInformationAndSociety.htm here at the “London School of Economics and Political Science”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm but I am already hard at work on my “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm – being supervised by “Robin Mansell”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/robinMansell.htm (at L) and “Nick Couldry”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/nickCouldry.htm (at R). Wish me luck!

P.S. On the morning of graduation day I received the first line or so of a spam email on my mobile phone. It read, ‘Want more respect? Get a PhD’ – I found that obscurely encouraging…